Charbonneau Commission: We took gifts but not money, inspectors say

Monique Muise, The Gazette11.14.2012

During his second day on the stand at the Charbonneau Commission inquiry, city of Montreal technician Michel Paquette — currently suspended without pay from his job monitoring construction work sites for the municipality — told the commissioners that in 2002, entrepreneur Tony Conte asked him if he was interested in making “more money” on top of his salary.

MONTREAL - More hockey tickets, more swanky dinners and more bottles of wine — but not a single envelope stuffed with cash.

During another long day of testimony, the Charbonneau Commission heard from two municipal inspectors that they accepted plenty of gifts while supervising local worksites of behalf of the city of Montreal, but — unlike some of the city engineers who were drawing up the construction plans and contracts — they never took any money.

Michel Paquette, who began his testimony on Wednesday, and François Thériault, who took the stand on Thursday afternoon, were both adamant that they did their jobs to the best of their ability — visiting construction sites and filing daily reports on the work being done, all the while being quite content with the salaries they were making.

The closest either of them said they came to dirty money was in 2002, when Paquette claims Conex construction boss Tony Conte approached him and asked if he was interested in making some extra cash on top of his municipal paycheque. Paquette said he knew that meant bribes, and that he wasn't interested.

"I was happy just to go to hockey games and golf tournaments," said the public servant, who also admitted to accepting bottles of wine at Christmas and a few dinners from contractors over the course of his 19-year career with the city of Montreal.

Paquette testified that he had no idea others in his department were accepting tens of thousands of dollars in kickbacks at the time, but that he had suspicions that some of his colleagues might be involved in collusion. He never voiced those concerns to anyone — and he never breathed a word about Conte's alleged offer to his bosses.

"I was afraid of the possible consequences," Paquette explained. "(Afraid) that I could lose my job ... I kept it to myself."

Paquette and Thériault, who between them have monitored dozens of work sites for the city over the past decade, both said they were surprised at the scope of the collusion that was apparently going on in their department in the mid-2000s, and only learned recently just how rampant it was.

Both men are currently suspended from their municipal jobs.

Thériault's testimony, which lasted only about an hour, was in many ways indistinguishable from Paquette's. He accepted hockey tickets, dinner invitations and bottles of wine at Christmas, he said, and once took a vacation with Conte to the Dominican Republic — a trip Thériault insisted he paid for out of his own pocket.

"It was my first trip with an entrepreneur, and when I got back, I did think about it," Thériault said, acknowledging that he suspected it did present a conflict of interest and that travelling with Conte was "unethical."

As for the hockey tickets, Thériault said he accepted them from BP Asphalte mainly to treat his father — a big hockey fan — and that he himself would often leave the games after the second period.

Thériault said he was never offered the chance to collect cash "rewards" from entrepreneurs, and he was never given any money by construction bosses or any of their employees. That was a direct contradiction of the testimony of former Infrabec Construction boss Lino Zambito, who told the commission in October that Thériault was pocketing 15 per cent of the "false extras" that Infrabec dreamed up and charged for on sites that Thériault supervised.

Like Paquette, Thériault testified that all of the material gifts and invitations stopped after 2008 with the introduction of a new code of ethics for city employees.

"You could say that that's what it took for us to take notice (of the possible ethical issues)," he said.

The commission is in recess until Monday morning, when it is expected that a lawyer representing Raynald Desjardins — one of the few non-Italians ever to enter the inner circle of the Rizzuto crime organization — will appear to ask the commissioners to retract a subpoena compelling his client to testify at the inquiry. Desjardins is currently awaiting trial in the killing of a reputed Montreal mob boss.